Tim Ferriss and Marie Forleo are highly respected thought leaders in the entrepreneur ecosystem and bestselling authors. I was interested to see how their philosophies overlapped regarding the proper role of intuition (gut feeling) in the decision-making process. As the leader of your business, you will need to make a lot of decisions, and you probably want to make better ones.
In “My Framework for Making Better Decisions and Trusting Your Intuition,” Tim Ferriss begins by talking about the different kinds of decisions you might need to make, and which ones don’t really matter as much, so you should make them quickly. Basically, you can just pick an option and move forward if something will be easily fixable or reversible because not that much is on the line.
Training yourself to make these types of decisions quickly will save mental resources and energy for more important decisions.
More important decisions require more analysis. Ferriss recommends a risk / benefit list instead of a pro / con list.
He also walks through the concept of a “whole body yes,” which is something I use with my career transition clients. We look for a yes (or go) signal from the head, the heart, and the gut. If we get that from all three, even if it feels scary or the way forward isn’t exactly clear, we know this is the right decision.
Ferriss says he finds it easier to feel a no vs. a yes. For him, a no in any of those three places feels like contraction or constriction.
You’ll find that sometimes something can look good from your risk / benefit analysis, but if you get a no from your head, heart, or gut, you probably want to go with that. (But beware of using your “intuition” as a catch-all excuse for doing what you want to do, which Ferriss says isn’t really intuition.)
In “How To Make The Right Decision When Your Gut And Logic Don’t Agree,” Marie Forleo dives into the important role of intuition in decision-making more deeply with an example from her own career. She walks us through why she did what she did, even though it might not have been the right choice on paper, but her intuition couldn’t have been clearer.
Spoiler alert: It worked out really well for her.
Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash
